Is iBook appropriate for image editing with PS?

[joshua daniels]

I'm a long time PC user, but I'm getting fed up with the old Windows

issues (yes, XP Pro is much better than what's come before, but the

annoyances still annoy). I'm currently using a machine with Intel P4 /

2.8, 1 gb. RAM, fast video card.

 

I'm interested in getting an iBook as a low price point entry into the

Mac world. This would not replace the PC but I intend to use it much

of the time for image editing. I would like to be sure that a) the

screen is up to doing imaging (can it be calibrated? does it have

enough of a contrast ration?)and b) that the processor is fast enough

to be efficient (I'm impatient with slow machines) running CS (I would

max out RAM at 1.25 GB). I plan to network it to my Windows file

server and use it in the field as a download box and image editor.

 

I would like to have your comments. Please advise if a Powerbook is a

better choice, or whether neither would serve.

[Karim Ghantous]

IMHO, a laptop is not a good tool for this sort of work. In fact I don't like laptops much at all but that's my bias. I would have suggested the Mac Mini except that you mentioned that you wanted to use it in the field. In fact a better choice for that sort of application is the Epson P-2000 or a device that copies memory cards to CD-Rs.

 

Why lug a laptop around with you? They are delicate, expensive, damage prone, loss prone and theft prone.

[jreades]

Just to set your expectations, there's no way that anything less than a desktop G5 will feel as fast as your current P4 system. Not an iBook. Not a PowerBook. Nothing.

 

OK, that said, there's no reason *not* to consider a switch to the Mac, especially if you're looking at the low end...

 

Since I assume that you already have the required peripherals, have you looked at the Mac Mini? $400 for a tiny little box with a G4 chip (same as in iBook and PowerBook) and a CD burner (DVD burner is more, natch). As long as most of your peripherals are USB or Firewire that would be your cheapest possible entry point. It's not going to blow you away with its power or performance, but it would give you a nice, easy way to get used to the Mac so that you can decide if you want to spend more money down the road on a professional system.

 

I would strongly suggest waiting a few months before buying a Mini since it hasn't been out long enough for the initial gremlins to manifest (rule of thumb: always wait for the second or third revision of a brand new Mac product... since they push the envelope design-wise they tend to have some hardware issues with the early releases).

 

If you want to go mobile, then personally I'd go with an iBook. You'll have a fully-portable machine but won't have sunk thousands of dollars into a PowerBook. If you fill it out with enough RAM it will perform well enough and it has a mini-DVI connection that would allow you to attach it to an external monitor. It can only do mirroring (IIRC), and not dual-monitor, but that's hardly the end of the world.

 

If you just lust after the PowerBook (and were hoping for justifications to buy it) then nothing I can say will stop you. Personally, I don't feel like there's enough of a difference between the two lines right now to make the extra expense justifiable. I also have a strong word of warning -- it's widely expected that Apple will be introducing G5 PowerBooks some time later this year (could be as early as June, but more likely to be towards the end). Of course, no one knows for sure, but there are strong indications that this is the case.

 

HTH,

 

jon

 

P.S. You could, of course, look at the iMac G5 or the PowerMac G5, but since you were asking about portables I largely stuck to portables.

[jreades]

<p>Further to this discussion: <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/08/apple_widescreen_ibook/">Wide Screen iBook Rumours</a>.</p>

[andre j.]

Josh, welcome to my world! You are going to love it! The MAC is where it's at when it

comes to graphics. I have a 12" Pbook with 1.25GB RAM and a 80 GB HD which works well

in PS. I also have a dual G5 with 4 GB ram which I use for intensive work. But frankly the

laptop gets used a lot more, since I can use it anywhere, not just in my dark basement

office! The iBOOKs have slightly slower frontside busses, slightly slower memory, and are

made from polycarbonate, just like my 300D - which by the way seems to be holding quite

well qfter 15 months... So bottom line, the iBOOK is great way to get started with the MAC,

just max the memory and HD and definiteley pickup an external drive, USB 2.0 or forewire

if your iBOOK has that. You will be loving life! Make sure you get the Adobe RAW stuff

installed into PS - it rocks! I will never shoot anything but RAW from now on - the latitude

in the digital darkroom is revolutionary: WB at will, +-2 stops with a few clicks, shadow

and highlight control... AWESOME!

[gui_carvalho]

For what it's worth, there's a hack for the iBook that does let you do screen spanning instead of just mirroring. Link is "http://www.rutemoeller.com/mp/ibook/ibook_e.html". This is a much more useful for image editing at home than mirroring.

[Brad_]

It will work in a pinch - I've done it with my PowerBok. The display is a huge limitation, not

having the same view angle or contrast/brightness as a desktop LCD monitor. There's just

no comparison between my dual G5 destop and ACD displays and my 12" Powerbook.

[coconutdaydream]

if you want a larger screen, just hook it up to another monitor. honestly, i have 512mb of ram and i like my ibook just nice! i have the 1.33ghz model, and it's fast enough. i use a cpu accelerator program and boost my cpu speed by 15% and run Cunning Fox to stop all other program processes while using Photoshop so it gets all the memory it can.

[fpa]

I've edited scans from a DSIII on my iBook, and while the screen could be better, it's fine.

Photoshop's speed is certainly acceptable on it, and I can make mental corrections,

especially after calibrating the display. OTOH, I rarely use more than a few layers, and do

more traditional darkroom manipulations with mine, rather than compositing multiple

images. The biggest problem is that there isn't a lot of room for the palettes, without

continually moving them off the working image.

 

This being said, the screen is relatively low contrast, as compared to a good desktop LCD,

PowerBook, or Thinkpad. It's easy on the eyes, and obviously designed for price/power

consumption. My iMac at work has a much better screen.

 

For the price, if portability isn't the issue, you could get a Mac Mini, which would be the

same speed and use whatever monitor you have for the XP box, or a G5 single-proc for

slightly more than the iBook, again using your existing monitor. My employer issued me a

17" iMac G5, and I've run photoshop CS on it without any problems. It's a lovely system,

with a much better screen than the iBook, and it's wider than normal so there's still room

for your image, plus all of the palettes spread out. If I had my druthers, I would have

pushed for the 20", but that's a minor quibble

[joshua daniels]

I thank all of you for the excellent, and wide ranging opinion. My sense is that an iBook, while far from ideal, is adequate for image editing. I haven't gotten as much response regarding screen quality and ability to calibrate. Any further thoughts there?

[akochanowski]

Josh, though this is in a different direction, I took the Sony Vaio S-series path last year and have been extremely happy. The reason I did was because I wanted a laptop to be my primary image editing system. The XBrite screen just knocked me out when I saw it in use. It has a 16:9 format, so I have room for the image and palettes, and it is wonderfully bright and useable. It matches very well my larger NEC screen, and WYSIWYG on my Epson 1280. The S series has a narrow footprint and weighs 4 lbs with a battery. I use it extensively when traveling and shooting. All in all, a great setup. Yeah, a Win is a Win, but I must admit the XP OS has not ever crashed on me in a year of use.

[boris_ochan]

"I'm interested in getting an iBook as a low price point entry into the Mac world. This

would not replace the PC but I intend to use it much of the time for image editing. I would

like to be sure that a) the screen is up to doing imaging (can it be calibrated? does it have

enough of a contrast ration?)and b) that the processor is fast enough to be efficient"

 

The processor is fast enough but, further to what Brad said, the display is a huge

limitation if you intend to use it for any serious editing. I use a 12inch iBook on location

(primarily because it's tougher than a Powerbook and the battery life is a bit better) but the

monitor sucks in a really major way.

[coconutdaydream]

apples with os X come with a utility called Color Sync that allows you to create ICC profiles for your monitors. you can create multiple ones with different gamma corrections, so you can see what Windows users might see, as well as other mac users. ive had no problems with it, and my colors are pretty dead set.

[carl photography]

Our new 14" iBook is accurately calibrated, using the built-in Mac software (with a couple

of re-runs to do some manual tweaking). I always tilt the screen to the same angle as

when I calibrated it.

 

The Powerbook has a somewhat better screen, but is much more expensive. The iBook's

screen is as good as most PC laptops, according to last month's Consumer Reports issue.

 

At home, I sometimes attach our 21" or 19" Sony CRT monitor to the iBook -- "the best of

both worlds."

 

Definitely max out the RAM, if you edit 100MB TIFFs with multiple layers. Otherwise,

768MB might be adequate (and would save 200 bucks). For huge files, you might want a

Powerbook with 2GB RAM.

 

I NEVER connect our PC to the Internet. We use the Mac for email, downloading and

Websurfing; it's very safe and secure.

 

Our old three-harddrive PC does perform photo editing a bit faster than the iBook -- but I

wouldn't buy another PC.

 

"Brandon's Dad"

[boris_ochan]

"Our new 14" iBook is accurately calibrated"

 

Sadly, it doesn't matter how much calibrating you do - the monitor on an iBook (or a

Powerbook for that matter) just can't give the tonal separation you need for serious image

editing. They're great tools for location work but that's about it.

[._._z]

The iBook lets you twin-out to an external monitor, and there are software hacks

available to permit it to span-out to an external, as the Powerbook can. And those

external monitors can give the tonal separation needed for serious editing.

 

The widescreen iBook rumor is from Digitimes; it should be noted that their reports

have been consistently inaccurate. They earlier claimed, for example, that Apple would

be shipping G5 iBooks as well as G5 PowerBooks by end of the 2nd Quarter of 2005,

which by all reports is impossible given the heat output of current G5 chips.

[gv]

"... the monitor on an iBook (or a Powerbook for that matter) just can't give the tonal

separation you need for serious image editing. "

 

I think it comes down to how one defines "serious." If a person is editing and printing

images on their personal inkjet printer, then I think it is relatively easy to produce good

prints even though the iBook screen may not be the "best" for image editing. On the other

hand, if a person is working in a production environment or sending files to be processed

elsewhere, then using an iBook may be a bit problematic.

 

Many people do not need everything to be 1st Class, whether they can afford it or not. I

have made excellent prints on a first generation Epson Stylus Photo using Apple's

ColorSync utility to calibrate my equipment. It took little effort to tweak things so that the

monitor and prints matched. Others seem to prefer spending a lot of time seeking

"perfection." To each their own.

 

I don't do much printing these days, but I do my image editing in PS 7 on a 1GHZ iBook

with 1.25GB RAM. It may be "slow" but I don't notice it, because I'm not comparing it

side-by-side with a Dual 2.5GHZ G5. Nor am I doing a lot of image manipulation; my work

doesn't require it. Speed really is relative, and the focus on a computer's "speed" is

primarily a result of clever marketing (and the tendency for people to want the newest and

best consumer goody...) instead of being based on what an individual needs. Ditto for

monitors.

 

So I think an iBook will work fine for you if it meets your needs. I would add an external

Firewire drive, partitioned with a Photoshop scratch volume and a clone of the iBook

system on another. (In my experience, SuperDuper! is a better cloning app than

CarbonCopyCloner.) The cloned volume will come in handy should your iBook drive ever

fail. And an external drive makes backing-up a snap.

[oskar_ojala]

IMAO, the processor is way too old and way too slow. I advise you to try before buy, if possible -- some will say the speed is ok, some will say it's not so YMMV.

[pete_su]

Until this year, I did most of my photoshop on an 800mhz G4 Powerbook. It was fine. Except

for the small screen, the new iBooks are all beefier than that machine, so they should be fine

too.

[jreades]

Likewise -- I'm writing this on my 'primary' (read: only) machine: a 667MHz G4 PowerBook. I've just finished installing a new 7200rpm hard drive after the original 4200rpm one blew up (figuratively) and have noticed a definite improvment. But I was happy enough running PS before anyway...

 

Even the cheapest iBook is about twice as fast on clock speed nowadays. Not sure about bus speed, but I'd imagine that they're the same now.

 

jon

[gv]

If you are serious about getting an iBook I recommend waiting until May. There is a major

Apple conference in April and there is a chance for an iBook-related announcement. If

something dooes change in the iBook line then you can get the current models for less

$$$ or a presumably improved iBook for the same (or less) cost.

 

I snagged my G4 1GHZ 12" iBook through a university bookstore in December when a

special was available at some colleges. The 1.2GHZ iBook had replaced it and was available

in stores. The "left-over" 1GHZ iBooks went for between $600-$650, depending on where

you shopped. That is the kind of deal I look for when Apple updates a product line.